Every step of the process, we're here to answer any and all of your questions.

Discover that math isn’t just a subject in school—it’s a fundamental, creative tool that artists and engineers use to design and invent! Design Zone highlights the relationship between mathematical thinking and the creative process in art, music, and engineering. Visitors solve real-world challenges. Design Zone is organized into three interactive thematic areas. Each thematic area draws visitors into real-life scenes of music production, video game development, and extreme sports that directly and experientially relate mathematical concepts.

Design Zone has a wide visitor appeal, and was developed for families, school groups, and ages 10 - 14.

Virtual Tour

Hit the Target - In this full-body experience, you can launch a ball in the air and attempt to hit a target while learning more about the relationship between release angle and distance traveled.

Design A Roller Coaster—Take on the role of a roller coaster designer and test one of your company’s latest designs.

Turntables—Visitors use a graph of beats per minute to help them adjust the tempos of two songs up or down until they match to make a transition as smoothly as a professional DJ.

Sound Graph—Visitors talk, sing, or whistle into a microphone and see the sound displayed on a colorful, real-time graph of pitch over time.

Whack-a-Phone—By whacking tubes of different lengths, your visitors make music! The length of the tube determines the pitch.

Digital Strings—This electronic instrument uses the relationship between string length and pitch to create music. Visitors adjust the lengths of eight virtual strings, and then push a button to hear their musical pattern.

Slide-a-Phone—Adjust the overall length of the tube to change the pitch of the sound. While one person beats on the drumhead, the other slides the tube to play different notes.

Laser Light Show—Using a real laser, you can change the ratio of how fast one mirror moves relative to the other to create Lissajous patterns, the basis for many laser light show effects.

Roller Coaster Hills—The first step in roller coaster design is to understand the relationship between hill height and distance traveled. Start a ball rolling down a ramp from different heights to see how far it travels.

Build a Wall, Build a Plaza, Build a Tower—Visitors choose a challenge and test their abilities to continue a pattern in three dimensions as they try building a wall, a tower, or a plaza from custom printed architectural blocks.

Marble Maze—The goal of the game is to navigate the maze, avoid the black holes, and roll over stars to collect points. Adjust the variables and design a game that gives you the highest score.

Jump On It—Like a classic arcade game! Visitors choose a character, select a scene, and adjust the jump power and gravity to find out how these variables affect the character’s jump height.

Picture Calculator—Take a selfie and manipulate the values of the pixels to transform your photo.

Availability

DatesLocation

Spring 2019

Museum of Discovery and Science | Fort Lauderdale, FL

Summer 2019

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Fall 2019

Grand Rapids Public Museum | Grand Rapids, MI

Spring 2020

Grand Rapids Public Museum | Grand Rapids, MI

Summer 2020

miSci | Schenectady, NY

Fall 2020

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School Resources

Educator Guide

A collection of PDFs and guides for museum staff and teachers to expand on the educational content of the exhibit, including in-classroom experiments and activities for your museum floor.

This video-based professional development program builds on findings from the REVEAL research study and is intended to be a catalyst for staff facilitators in museums, science centers, and other informal learning environments to discuss, reflect on, and improve their educational practices.